This week in Strasbourg 37 participants from 11 European countries were welcomed by the AMSED association to address the issue of E-learning, a training technique based on the provision of educational content via an electronic medium.

This training is divided into 3 major meetings each developing an important step in the design of online training for EVS. The first part took place in Lefkada, Greece, where participants learned how to create different online training sessions, each developing the 8 key skills of young European volunteers, thus introducing them more to the professional world.

The training continue here in Strasbourg with new participants and objectives, in fact the aim is to create evaluation tools for online training and the design tools to validate the skills acquired by the participants of previous sessions. Finally, the attendees will make a final appointment in Romania to acquire additional skills to become “E-Tutors” for young European volunteers benefiting from the online training sessions via the Moodle platform.

The aim of this seminar is to enable Voluntary Service actors to acquire skills and attitudes that will enable them to train and resource themselves in order to develop their skills and talents, as well as modernise their working methods, with the aim of optimising the quality of the support they provide to volunteers and further improving the quality of their volunteer projects. To be more specific, participants will acquire theoretical skills and develop knowledge about:

distance learning via Web 2.0 using Moodle, on the structure of an interactive distance learning course;

methods for monitoring and evaluating distance learners in a non-formal setting; distance tutoring for European volunteers

All these skills will be transmitted with interactive methods, through non-formal training tools, i.e. all activities will directly involve the participants using energisers, inter-knowledge activities, and informal exchanges, with this type of learning each participant brings his own experience.

This new meeting welcomed new participants, who did not follow the previous training in Greece, so that all groups were the most dynamic and equal, a refresher was necessary. The new participants were able to acquire all the basic information on the design of online training as well as non-formal education methods. The teaching team was thus able to introduce new concepts such as: ADDIE, a very important tool in the creation of online training, because it represents the different stages of design, namely analysis, the elaboration of evaluations, development and finally execution; Learning objectives; bloom’s taxonomy etc.

The courses created by the participants will be accessible on Moodle, a copyright-free platform that allows everyone to access and modify the content, so everyone brings their knowledge which allows the platform to offer good content always updated.

Different topics were proposed to the participants, then each group created a training course that met the criteria of non-formal online education, offering activities such as quizzes, questions, interactive videos, etc. The participants were given the opportunity to participate in a variety of activities.

The aim was to transmit specific knowledge to volunteers on subjects that directly concern them, namely conflict management, the environment and culture shock. At the end of each training, the volunteers will be evaluated and will receive a certificate containing all the acquired skills, which will be very useful not only in their personal but also in their professional life.